Pop Sensation Shawn Mendes on His New Album, Illuminate, Out Today

At his recent show at Madison Square Garden, Shawn Mendes sat down at a keyboard on a small circular stage in the middle of the arena. The crowd erupted. He glanced to the left—a noncommittal swivel, maybe 30 degrees—and was greeted with more yells. He uttered one word, “Hello,” and incited a frenzy. “I cannot hear myself at all right now,” he told the crowd later. “I love that so much.”

Mendes was performing in support of his second album, Illuminate, which arrives today. He’s a young Canadian star, just 18, who’s had a thoroughly contemporary route to fame: His career was launched in part by the app Vine, which he used to post short snippets of cover songs. After the clips were looped hundreds of millions of times, Mendes signed with Island Records and released his debut, Handwritten, last year.

Mendes is never far from his guitar, and he tends to describe his mission in the purist language favored by grizzled male rock fans well into their 50s. Examples from our brief phone conversation include: “All it was is feel”; “It was just so real”; “We just hung out and created music and loved doing it, and that’s all that really matters.”

Mendes’s ascent comes at a time when women dominate the pop landscape, from the juggernauts—Beyoncé, Rihanna, Adele, Taylor Swift—to the growing crop of young singers who have landed hits in the past few years: Ariana Grande, Meghan Trainor, Charli XCX, Tove Lo, Fifth Harmony, Halsey, Lorde, Selena Gomez, Daya, and Alessia Cara, among others. In contrast, the ranks of men are surprisingly thin, with just a few—Mendes, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Nick Jonas—getting Top 40 play as regularly as their female counterparts.

Judging by Mendes’s show at Madison Square Garden, the dearth of young male pop stars is not a demand-side problem. Fans, mostly teen girls, sang along vigorously to the music that played over the PA system before Mendes even hit the stage, and they sent five or six rounds of the wave around the arena. Once Mendes arrived, the volume level in the venue far exceeded Kanye West’s show at MSG less than a week before. These same fans helped Mendes’s first album debut at number one and sent the record’s third single, “Stitches,” into the top five.

Onstage, Mendes engaged in a relentless charm offensive, always ready with a statement of humility, appreciation—“I’m so grateful to have a connection like I do with you guys”—or encouragement: A voice-over informed the crowd solemnly, “What you’re looking for is within you.” Much of the music on Illuminate is similarly invested in themes of reassurance: “I don’t care what they say about you, baby,” Mendes sings on “Bad Reputation.” “Trust me, I could be the one to treat you like a lady.” On the oddly phrased song “Like This,” he declares, “I love it how she’s honest, you don’t find that nowadays. / She’s not even drop-dead gorgeous, but she kills me anyway.”

But Mendes also tiptoes around edgier topics. On the surface, the single “Treat You Better” is another display of courteous courtship—“Any girl like you deserves a gentleman”—but in fact it is a song about breaking up another relationship. The corresponding video presents Mendes’s rival as abusive and unfaithful, allowing the singer to play the role of good guy, and the clip ends with a phone number for a hotline to report domestic violence.

Mendes is aiming for a career similar to that of John Mayer or Ed Sheeran. He has been particularly enamored with Mayer’s Grammy-winning album, Continuum. Illuminate is produced by Jake Gosling, who also oversaw Sheeran’s biggest hit, “Thinking Out Loud.” “Lots of signs were pointing me toward working with this guy,” Gosling explains by Skype from his home in England. “Shawn was brought up on [Sheeran’s] music, so there was a major influence. We also had the same matching jumper.”

Gosling positions himself as a conduit for Mendes’s vision. “He wants to take it someplace, and having someone like me on board can help him get those ideas out of his head,” the producer says. “That’s sort of my role: make him feel at ease, work with him to get under the skin of what sound he likes and where his influences are.” Mendes agrees with this characterization: “[Gosling] is the number one guy at taking what you believe in and making it great. He took the thought and made it into a song.”

Several of the thoughts turned songs approximate classic soul ballads, including “Ruin” and “Don’t Be a Fool.” Performing these tracks at Madison Square Garden allowed Mendes to reach into a huskier part of his vocal range. “That was something I found inside of me halfway through the album,” he says. “It just flew out.”

Mendes suggests these twists are a sign of things to come—fitting for a star who emerged via social media. “I think that’s kind of how it’s going to be with me,” he says. “One day people will be like, ‘Whoa, where did this come from?’ My answer’s gonna be: ‘I don’t know. Out of nowhere.’”